We were lucky last night to have Matt Brodeur drive up from his day job at RedHat in Westford, MA to present a meeting on GPG, the open source implementation of OpenPGP, the Pretty Good Privacy algorithms and utilities. Matt had a slideshow in OpenOffice.org 2 Impress (available at http://www.nexttime.com/mbrodeur/GPG2007) and in PDF here.

Eleven attendees made it to the meeting. Matt briefly discussed the origins of PGP, and then dove right into the process and utilities of how Privacy Guard works. Matt also had brought some scripts he replayed to walk through the sequence of generating a key pair, signing another’s key, sharing keys to a keyserver. Matt walked us through the concepts behind the Web of Trust and the issues and processes of revoking keys. During the presentation and following, there were a fair number of questions and Matt dealt with them well.

Although we had hoped to have a keysigning as part of the meeting, we elected to postpone that portion to future meetings. As the group is fairly small, we agreed we can do individual signings as needed.

Future meetings: March 5th will feature Andy Bair talking about “Digital Forensics File Carving,” a popular topic he’s presented at several other groups. On April 2nd, William Stearns will do a presentation on Logical Volume Management. I saw Bill do an LVM presentation at DLSLUG back in 2005, and he had a great presentation. Looking forward to seeing both presentations!

About Ted Roche

Contoocook, NH based developer working at Ted Roche & Associates, LLC. Former FoxPro expert, now specializing in Open Source web development using the LAMP stack and WordPress.